ATTRACTIONS
AN IP HOLDER’S MAIN COLLATERAL IS HIS IP. HE’S NOT GOING TO LET YOU WALK ALL OVER IT
umbrella at the centre of MMM. Every brand, franchise and partner is unique, each with its own challenges and, indeed, each with its own rewards. When Fisher, who joined Merlin
Entertainments in 1995, took the role of chief development officer for MMM in 2011, it was all about reaching out and building relationships. He got rid of the existing system, where IPs were managed haphazardly by different staff across the globe, and appointed an IP director, Jonathan Lewis, to anchor the license portfolio — a criti- cal component in Merlin’s business model. Present IP partnerships include licenses for Madagascar and Ice Age with Fox, CBeebies with the BBC (and others), Saw with Lionsgate, Sonic the Hedgehog with Sega, Angry Birds with Rovio Entertainment and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with the Roald Dahl estate. “We got on a plane and went to sit down with all the Hollywood studios,” Fisher says. “DreamWorks was one of them, and we got on really well.” That led to the Madagascar
Ocean characters the Octonauts (above) proved a good fit for Merlin’s Sea Life. The Zingzillas perform at CBeebies Land (below)
shows, where the teams on both sides worked together. When Merlin pitched the idea of the Shrek attractions, DreamWorks “was in the right frame of mind to look at it,” says Fisher. The initial agreement reached with DreamWorks is for Merlin’s midways operating group to open six attrac- tions named Shrek’s Far Far Away Adventure over the next 10 years. The first of these will be in 2015 in London, a new addition to the FTSE 250 company’s Thames-side cluster at County Hall, where the London Eye, Sea Life London and London Dungeon
are located. The other Far Far Away Adventure locations have not been decided, but will be in different coun- tries around the world on sites of between 20,000sq ft and 30,000sq ft (2,000sqm and 3,000sqm). The fam- ily-focused attractions will be actor-led, interactive Shrek adventures, “where you’ll actually take part in the story,” says Fisher. “It’s participative like the Dungeons, and massively immersive, so you’ll feel like you’re in the middle of the story. That’s the majority of it, and then there’s a second part where you’ll meet some of Shrek’s friends and other DreamWorks characters.” The beauty of this first Far Far Away Adventure is twofold: its proximity to other Merlin offerings, and Shrek’s enduring and age-spanning appeal.
“From a strategy point of view, you can cross-sell tickets across sites, have bigger central management teams in those clusters, things like that,” says Fisher. “And I suspect it won’t just be about cross-selling to our visitors, but that it will actually drive more peo- ple into London because there’s been a massive interest and people will come into London to try it.” Fisher adds that the franchise fits well with Merlin’s wider midway strategy. These attractions need to be chainable and scalable: “We’re not interested in hav- ing one-off midways round the world.” When it comes to Shrek’s popularity, his audience has been growing since the first film was released in 2001. From the beginning, the characters and narratives have offered enough ambiguity in interpretation to enter- tain both children and adults. And it’s
58 Read Leisure Management online
leisuremanagement.co.uk/digital ISSUE 4 2014 © cybertrek 2014
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